"Christen, your parasites, have they died?"
[Asked of me by the 20-year-old twelfth-grade student who lives on KB's compound, upon my first visit back to the house following a small brush with giardia. For the benefit of concerned readers, my parasites have, in fact, died, as a result of some absolutely marvelous tinidazole pills.]
I was speaking today with a local government manager from another town who was in Debremarkos for a conference. He spoke to me about the many benefits he saw coming out of Meles Zenawi's presidency: an increase in the number of universities, an increase in the average educational attainment of civil servants, an increase in relative freedoms and democracy (from those experienced during the rule of the socialist-inspired Military Coordinating Committee known as the Derg), and higher levels of foreign investment. When asked about
In Amharic, the national language of
The language's own future appears similarly unformulated. Recent, "modern" concepts are expressed almost exclusively in the English language of the countries from which they have been adopted: "strategy," "policy," "project," "bureaucracy," "sector," "mainstreaming," and technologies like "photo copy," "refrigerator," and "computer." In fact, the ancient Ge'ez alphabet in which Amharic is written has recently had to adopt a new seven-form character to provide the "v" sound in English words like "television," "DVD," "university," and "HIV." The addition is a bold move for a country that maintains its own time apart from the rest of the world, having refused since 1582 to give up the Julian calendar in favor of the Gregorian revision.
